Andrew Breitbart died 6 years ago

Andrew Breitbart died 6 years ago

Andrew Breitbart died 6 years ago today. We have remembered the anniversary of his death each year since then.

You can read our March 1, 2012, report, Andrew Breitbart dead:

Very sad news to report, just breaking.  Andrew Breitbart is dead.

Via Big Journalism:

Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles.

We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.

… There are few people who are irreplaceable, but Andrew may have been one of those few.

I wrote A personal note on the death of Andrew Breitbart that day:

I only spoke once with Andrew Breitbart. He reached out to me, and we spoke by phone.  The topic is not important, but I was shocked that he even knew who I was; but as I’ve come to learn, Andrew seemed to know who everyone was in the conservative blogosphere.  He was just that way.

Since my wife called this morning to let me know of Andrew’s death, it has been hard to focus on anything else.  In her words, we don’t have that many bright media lights, and to lose him hurts.

It has been something of a mission for me to document and rebut the media lies spread about his video of Shirley Sherrod, yet those lies continue to be spread:

• The Original Sherrod Clip Was Not “False”
• Dissecting Shirley Sherrod’s Complaint Against Andrew Breitbart
• Saturday Night Card Game (Repeat after me: “The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading”)
• The myth of Andrew Breitbart’s “deceptively edited” Shirley Sherrod tape lives on at Slate.com
• NY Times perpetuates myth of Andrew Breitbart’s misleading Shirley Sherrod video
• Shirley Sherrod case settled, now put to bed myth that Breitbart’s tape was misleading

So this tweet of his responding to the false accusations about Sherrod was classic and became one of his most famous quotes: Apologize for What? It also was tweeted the day of this death, and was his second to last tweet:

There’s another quote of his I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, “politics is downstream of culture.”

People can read into that what they want. On the day of Breitbart’s death, Byron York wrote:

Breitbart knew instinctively, as people in Washington and most other places did not, that movies, television programs, and popular music send out deeply political messages every hour of every day. They shape the culture, and then the culture shapes politics. Influence those films and TV shows and songs, and you’ll eventually influence politics.

The Left had known that for generations, but on the Right, so many people in politics thought only about politics. To Breitbart, that was folly. “The people who have money, every four years at the last possible second, are told, ‘You need to give millions of dollars, because these four counties in Ohio are going to determine the election,’” Breitbart told the National Policy Council in October 2009. “I am saying, why didn’t we invest 20 years ago in a movie studio in Hollywood, why didn’t we invest in creating television shows, why didn’t we create institutions that would reflect and affirm that which is good about America?”

I think Breitbart’s point was not about “culture wars.” It wasn’t about gay marriage or any of the other hot social issues. It was about a systematic tearing down of “that which is good about America” that started on the campuses and has migrated into the entertainment and media cultures while Breitbart was still alive.

Now it’s migrated again into the corporate, and particularly high tech, culture. Corporate capitulation to left-wing social media campaigns reflects that fear of negative publicity from the left is more important than the rights of those on the right.

I’ve heard the characterization, not sure who gets credit for it, that the culture war has been lost, and what’s happening now is that the winners are searching the countryside to finish off the survivors.

The concentration of power in a small number of left-leaning or outright leftist high tech companies poses an enormous threat to our freedom, more so than Hollywood ever did. Hollywood pushed out content, these tech companies control content others produce.

The very means by which people communicate is bottlenecked on social media platforms (Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter and a few others) that are hostile to speech liberals don’t like. It’s no surprise that the groups behind the anti-NRA campaign are focused on getting streaming services to shut down NRA-TV. It’s not about gun control or protecting students, but a totalitarian impulse to silence non-liberal opinions and content.

As we reflect on this totalitarian form of the culture, it’s worth wondering what Andrew Breitbart would have done.

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